A Good Reason to NEVER Share the Gospel With Anyone

I've been reading blog posts and articles in the last few weeks that are hit-and-miss around the topic of hell, all brought on by the Rob Bell book, of course.  Reading the comments in many of the blogs has convinced me of two things: 

(1) There's a LOT of bad theology walking around out there, and

(2) Many people can't seem to see the logical inconsistency in the propositions they say they uphold

One of the most striking has been the idea that God will not hold anyone who has not heard the gospel accountable for their sin.  I won't go into a long theological treatise here, but say this-

If you really believe that God won't hold people who have never heard the gospel accountable for their sin, then you should NEVER UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES share the gospel with anyone, lest they reject it and wind up in hell.

In fact, let's defund all the missionaries and bring them home.  We have whole countries (yea, continents) that haven't heard the gospel yet...how about we just don't tell them so they won't be accountable for their sin?  If we could bury all the bibles in the world and shut down all the churches, and make it illegal to share the gospel, then we could all safely become universalists, because with no one hearing the good news, everyone would wind up in paradise, no?

Sorry to sound crass, but demonstrating the illogic of those peoples' position requires it, I think.

Contextualizing Randall County- What is Our Culture?

Because of the discussions recently with a group meeting at my church (Once-a-month-Lunch Group), I’ve been doing some thinking about how we can contextualize where FBC is in relation to our culture, which is Randall County and more specifically, the city of Canyon and surrounding subdivisions.

It hasn’t been easy, and in doing research, there’s a lot more out there about cultures like Mark Driscoll’s (Seattle, one of the most secular cultures in the world) than cultures like this county and city.  I did manage to find one, a short video on YouTube by Matt Chandler, about the context he works in in the Fort Worth area, which church-wise, is similar to our own, even though economically and demographically, it is much different.  Take a look at the video and notice the parallels, and how we address them as a church and as individuals sharing the gospel.

http://fwd4.me/Nxg

I’ve heard about all the unchurched people in Randall County, but I’ve disagreed, both semantically and practically, with the way the term is used and the numbers are reported.  The terms I’ve used (and prefer) instead of ‘unchurched’ are de-churched and dys-churched.  By de-churched, I mean folks who at one time went to church, were possibly church members, but for whatever reasons, left the church and don’t attend or participate anymore.  By dys-churched, I mean folks who left church under bad circumstances, such as felt lik they were no longer believers, had a bad life experience and blamed God, bought into agnosticism or athiesm, or even were run out of church (rightly or wrongly) by other church members.

I think Matt addresses this problem in his video, but I don’t think he gives us as many answers as we need.  How does one address a culture inoculated against the gospel?

Saving the Local Church

My local church leadership is in a bit of a quandry right now- they are aware of the changes in demographics in the community and aware of the drop in numbers over the last few years at the church.  The question then is, "What do we do about it?"

Even asking the question is full of pitfalls.  When we talk about the culture and the church, and how they do/should intermingle, we bring multiple perspectives into play, and many time folks end up arguing points without having any agreement on what terms mean or where the focus should be in making changes.

Our church does not seem to have any agreement on some basic building blocks from which to create a plan for dealing with the negative changes.  For example, do we believe in a regenerate worship, or an evangelical worship?  It seems that we need to establish that fact before we start talking about how to engage our local community.  And, where do we believe the emphasis comes from in moving the lost toward the cross...is it from common grace that God gives all to be able to come to Christ, or is it from saving grace God gives to the elect that brings them to Christ?  I don't see how we can come up with a plan to evangelize our city until we agree (at least in principle) on that belief.

These are hard questions.  There are sincere believers on both sides of the above arguments, and getting all these to an accord on these important questions is daunting.  I was speaking to the pastor this past Sunday about one parallel issue, age-segregation.  It seems, based on comments in the meetings we've had, that one of the few things almost everybody agrees on  is that we want age-segregation to stop in our church.  Yet, the solution to that is seemingly unobtainable.  We have two vastly different worship styles in our two main services (contemporary and traditional), and the median ages in the two services are probably close to 40 years (an entire generation) apart.  We have age-graded Sunday School, separate worship services for our children and college students, separate ministers dedicated to age-delimited groups (youth, college, senior adults), and so on.  In other words, the entire church is built around age-segregation.  It would appear we need to dismantle most of the church's structure to get away from age-segregation.  That's not an easy task.

My point of emphasis that I've tried to say in multiple ways through this process is, we need to change the methods to reach our culture, but we cannot change the message of the gospel.  The gospel itself is our true relevance to the culture around us, not our ability to look like the culture around us, or relate to its participants.  This is one facet that I hope we have enough wisdom to cement into place as we look for ways to reach our culture for Christ.